Young job seekers are constantly warned to watch what they share on social media. You never know who may be viewing your profile. It was just this thought sparked Dr. Peter Rosen, a professor at the University of Evansville, to collaborate on a research project on the topic of Facebook and what your profile says about you.

The efforts of Dr. Rosen and his collaborators received national acclaim and was recently published in the Wall Street Journal. With this local affiliation to social media research, we decided to dig a bit deeper with Dr. Rosen on the topic. Below is a question and answer session discussing Dr. Rosen’s research and views on social media.

What sparked the idea of using social media as a tool to predict job performance?

Dr. Rosen: A number of years back I was talking to a colleague, Dr. Don Kluemper of Northern Illinois University, who researches in the area of Organizational Behavior.  His research was focused on personality and mine was on social networking websites.  We decided to talk about ways we could collaborate and a five-year partnership was born.

Why did you, and your co-authors, decide to target Facebook for this research?

Dr. Rosen: While the study was published in 2012, the research was conducted a few years back.  At this time MySpace was already in decline, Twitter was up and coming, LinkedIn was not heavily used, and blogs were not as popular as they are today.  Facebook was the natural choice for our study because the audience that was using the website was predominately college students, and these users tended to post a lot of content to their pages.  Believe it or not there were only 110 million registered FB users at the time of our first study together.  The depth of information that researchers can glean from FB profiles was greater than any other site that I mentioned previously, which was beneficial for our projects.

Based upon your research, what tips or suggestions do you have for job seekers and their social media profiles?

Dr. Rosen: I look at job seeking as selling your own personal brand.  The more information you can share across websites that sends a consistently positive message about your personal brand the better.  Show potential employers that you have something of value to offer them.  If you are in a field currently and looking to move positions, demonstrate your expertise in that area.  If you are looking to break into a new field, show that you are intellectual curious and eager to learn as much as you can about your new field of employment.

What is the 1 thing that you would suggest job seekers not do on their Facebook profile?

Dr. Rosen: While you might think that I am going to say avoid posting pictures of you and your friends enjoying an adult beverage, my answer is a little different.  My personal pet peeve is the person that consistently posts negative status messages, which shows that they score low in the personality trait of emotional stability.  There is something to be said about hiring a positive person in the workplace.

Do you have other published articles related to social media, or the online medium, in the job place? If so, where can we find them?

• Kluemper, D.H., Rosen, P.A., & Mossholder, K. Social networking websites, personality ratings, and the selection context: More Than Meets the Eye? Forthcoming at Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
• Rosen, P.A. (2011). Decision Making in a Web 2.0 Environment – Crowdsourcing Lessons for Organizations. Journal of Decision Systems, 20(3), 309-324.
• Rosen, P.A. & Phillips, M. (2011). Marketing And The Rise Of Web 2.0: Expanding Opportunity, Increasing Challenge. Review of Business Information Systems, 15(3), 35-42.
• Kluemper, D.H. & Rosen, P.A. (2009). Future Employment Selection Methods: Evaluating Social Networking Websites. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 24(6), 567-580.

About Dr. Peter Rosen

Dr. Peter Rosen

Dr. Peter A. Rosen is an Associate Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Evansville where he teaches both Information Systems and General Business courses. He earned his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems in 2005 from Oklahoma State University, an MBA from San Diego State University in 1996, and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1993. He currently teaches MGT 311- Management Information Systems, MGT 445 – Database Management, MGT 450 – Knowledge Management, and ID 150 – The American Corporation. His research interests include the areas of social media and its use, personal innovativeness, technology acceptance and use, technology in the classroom, customer relationship management, data mining and knowledge discovery techniques.  He has produced nine referred journal articles, nine conference papers, and three book chapters during his academic career.

You can find him online at Twitter (@peterarosen), LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.

Dr. Rosen also suggests following the Schroeder Family School of Business Administration at the University of Evansville on Twitter (@UEBusiness).

{photo credit: smemon/Flickr}